Matt McMahon details the importance of KJ Williams to LSU's offense

LSU suffered their second straight loss in conference play after losing to Texas A&M 69-56 on the road to Texas A&M on Saturday. The Tigers’ leading scorer KJ Williams was held to just 10 points and six shot attempts in College Station last weekend, which LSU lead coach Matt McMahon explained following the loss.

“One thing I think obviously is very important for us, his ability to score not only in the post but on the perimeter,” McMahon said. “Credit to A&M, I thought they did a really nice job with their double teams and some of their coverages to limit his inside touches.”

The Aggies held Williams to his worst shooting performance of the season, only making 33.3% of his shots compared to his 54.9% average from the field this season. Texas A&M was definitely effective at slowing down the SEC’s second-leading scorer, but also did well overall on defense against the Tigers, holding them to their worst scoring outing of the season with 56 points on just 34.7% shooting.

There’s no question Texas A&M was effective at stopping Williams and LSU’s offense, but McMahon has diagnosed their struggles and believes they’re fixable.

“So we have to do a better job of identifying some of those passing angles, in retrospect and studying the film we had some opportunities where there were some switches and instead of taking advantage of that inside we took some tough shots on the perimeter against the big on the switch,” McMahon explained. “So I think we have to continue to learn there.”

In two of the Tigers’ last three games defenses have dialed in on defending Williams, holding him to 10 or fewer points and seven or fewer shot attempts. The Tigers’ offense is definitely more effective when he’s scoring and shooting at a higher volume, but McMahon believes he can help the team in other ways outside of his scoring.

“But the other area where KJ is very good is he’s a willing passer, and so he needs to touch the basketball to enable not only him to have scoring opportunities. But when we did play through him on Saturday it opened up shots for other players as well,” McMahon said.

Williams stuffs the stat sheet, leading the team in points, rebounds, steals, and blocks per game, but has not been particularly effective in playmaking this season. The Tigers take on Florida at home in their next matchup, and it will interesting to see how Williams impacts their offense following his most recent showings.